Website and blog optimization is an integral part of content marketing. While SEO methods are always evolving, SEO still remains a powerful tool as far as drawing traffic to your website is concerned. Staying at the top is, however, not easy and you need to employ nothing but the best optimization techniques to compete favorably with others in the market.

Due to changing search engine rules among many other factors, verifying optimization techniques in real time is very difficult. This only means that you may need to try out a few methods before you can get methods that would work to the advantage of your business. You should, however, be wary of a number of common mistakes that have left many counting losses and with nothing to show for their efforts. Below we discuss the top ten SEO mistakes that you need to avoid if you want to draw enough leads to your website.

1. Using the Wrong KeywordsThe key to getting it right in SEO is finding the right keyword and making good use of it. While choosing a keyword sounds like an easy job, most people ignore search engine preference and stay away from long-tail keywords. This only means that the keywords used are either too generic or do not make sense to the target audience. When it comes to choosing a keyword, it is always important to conduct adequate research. Make use of tools such as AdWords, Google Trends and Keyword Planner. These tools will point you in the right direction and make selecting relevant and trending keyword easy.

2. Creating Content not related to the Keyword It is one thing to come up with the right keywords and yet a different thing to use it correctly in your content. You should take your time and create quality content that is relevant to the keywords you have chosen. Search engines want nothing but to serve all users right. Content that does not adequately serve the users will lead to a low ranking website at the end of the day.

3. Keyword Stuffing Overusing the keyword is detrimental to your SEO performance. You should, therefore, resist the urge to use the keywords you have chosen in every sentence otherwise search engines may register your keywords as spammy. Your content should sound natural and provide value to your target audience. In a bid to enhance user experience and take care of keyword stuffing, Google is developing a semantic search named Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI in short. This search will be able to recognize content that does not come with repetitions of keywords.

4. Failure to Include Tags and Meta DescriptionsSEO is not just about creating content and using the right keywords. You have to go the extra mile and include Title Tags, Image Tags, and Meta Descriptions to get the best out of your content and marketing efforts. These details, though minor, are considered by search engines while optimizing. Including them in your website content will, therefore, tremendously boost your ranking on search engines.

5. Using unoriginal Content Publishing duplicate content is discouraged and penalized by search engines. If you want to rank well on search engines, you have to use nothing but original and high quality content on your website. Cutting corners and ripping content from other websites or using spinning software to create content will work to your disadvantage. Search engines will only downgrade your website and reduce overall visibility online when you use low quality and unoriginal content.

6. Improper use of Internal Links It is important to incorporate internal links of various pages in your website. However, these links should not be haphazardly placed on your text. Only incorporate internal links where necessary and where the content is relevant to the link provided. Resist the urge to overuse internal links. Your audience will not be happy about this and your website will suffer low rankings in the end.

7. Using Low-Quality External links External links need to be of high quality for search engine optimization purposes. Instead of including many external links in your content, go for a few but high quality external links. Only include links of well-ranking websites. The links should be relevant to your content and also come with a great reputation. Many marketers also fail to use anchor texts to go with external links. Anchor texts offer SEO opportunities that you can make use of. Come up with a variety of anchor texts to support your links as using one anchor text over and over again can be considered spammy.

8. Failure to make use of influencers on social media Social media is a powerful tool in SEO and marketing. Before you create your own presence on various social media platforms, it pays to make use of the power of influencers. Work to get the attention of users with a significant online presence and where possible create relationships with such users. Work with these users and use them to promote your content and promotion posts to various social media platforms.

9. Low Quality website that is not Mobile-Friendly You may work hard to create quality content with all the right keywords and fail in making the same accessible to many people. A good website is a must have if you want to rank highly on any search. The website layout has to be just right and the load speed needs to be high for all kinds of users. Today many people spend numerous hours on their mobile devices and the best way to tap this people into your marketing strategy is to make your website accessible to them. Ensure that your website is mobile friendly to reap the maximum benefit of SEO.

10. Failure to track SEO progress This list of top ten SEO mistakes that you need to avoid cannot be complete without mentioning one grave mistake that most of us make… Failure to track our SEO progress. It goes without saying that there is no one size fit all as far as SEO is concerned. Most of the time, you need to try out different strategies to identify the ones that work for your business. The only way you will know whether a strategy is working or not is by performing regular audits to track progress. You can make use of tools such as Google Webmaster and Google Analytics to measure your website performance.

These are the top ten SEO mistakes that you should avoid. Take note of them and avoid them at all cost if you want to improve your website performance, generate more leads and grow your business over time.

Christopher Schwarz is the Owner of WebDesign499, a digital agency specializing in Web Design & Web Development and Managing Partner of C3LOCAL, an Internet Marketing & SEO agency. He can be contacted at chris@webdesign499.com.